Office Lens now available for iPhone and Android

We are pleased to share the news that the Office Lens is now available on iPhone and Android.

Taking pictures of whiteboards is a commonly used practice, enabling teachers and students to keep a copy of information and diagrams, long after the board eraser has cleaned the slate for the next class. Office Lens is an image capture app that effectively turns your smartphone into a portable scanner, with the power to recognizes the corners of a document or whiteboard, and automatically crops, enhances and cleans up the image, as well as normalising the perspective of the image. On top of all this, you can even send items directly to your OneNote, so the whole class can instantly access the information without having to wait.

Over on the Office Blogs, the OneNote team have shared full details of the iPhone release and how to get started with Office Lens, and to make it easier for you we’ll reproduce these below. If you’ve found a particularly innovative way to use Office Lens and OneNote in an educational setting, then please let us know and we’d love to share your stories!

Just over a year ago, we introduced Office Lens for Windows Phone—and over that time the app has become one of the most popular free apps on Windows Phone, with an average rating of 4.6 stars (out of 5) from more than 18,500 reviews.

Today, we’re releasing Office Lens for iPhone and Android phones.

Office Lens is a handy capture app that turns your smartphone into a pocket scanner and it works with OneNote so you’ll never lose a thing. Use it to take pictures of receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards or sticky notes—then let Office Lens crop, enhance and save to OneNote. Just like that—all the scanned images you capture from Office Lens are accessible on all your devices.

Office Lens for iPhone is available for free at the Apple App Store. Here’s a quick look at some of the more significant features and capabilities that Office Lens for iPhone supports:

Recognizes the corners of a document and automatically crops, enhances and cleans up the image.

Identifies printed text with optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can search by key word for the image in OneNote or OneDrive.

Under About this community, click the Become a Tester link and then follow instructions on the page.

Bringing Office Lens to iPhone and Android is a significant step for extending OneNote capture capabilities to more devices and endpoints. Get it for your iPhone, Android phone or Windows Phone today—start scanning documents and whiteboards from the convenience of your phone, and let us know what you think in the comments below and at app store feedback.

Office Lens is a great product, however there is one flaw. It would be really helpful if we could connect it to Enterprise logins, this would improve the functionality for businesses. At the moment it appears that you can only log into a Microsoft account which means O365 users would have to continuously move files between their MSFT account and their work account.

Hi Warren. Glad you like Office Lens, and thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us. The product team are aware of the current limitation facing Enterprise users, and are looking in to how to add this increased functionality in the future.